I have everything I had before except cdrecord prodvd (but that should work soon!)

That said, you have an ati card, that will be your stumbling block in you want accelerated graphics when using 64 at the moment._________________Tyan Tiger K8W, 2xOpteron 240,Powerbook5,6 15" 1.5g, Macbook Black 2g, Mac Mini 1g, Ipod P60g.
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I found the article interesting also, I am not sure how relevant it is since the test system was an ultrasparc. But as the compiler usec was GCC, I think the same may be true for amd64._________________LianLi PC60, OCZ PowerStream 520W PSU, Asus p5N-E SLI, Core2duo E6550,2Gb GEIL 4-4-4-12 DDR2, XFX Geforce 8800GT, TB santaCruz

Not really.
First of all, there are apps that use 64bit integers (oggenc comes to mind), and those will be way faster (more than 200%) in 64bit. It should also be possible to optimize quite a few applications for AMD64 to get a great speed-up (Mathematica's preformance increases by about 50% on 64bit).
But there's more: on a 64bit system, AMD64 CPU's use 16 registers, on 32bit there are only 8 registers. Don't know if all the renaming registers are available in 32bit mode.
So, the results from the Ultra5 are not really comparable...

Completely irrelevant. Yes, 64bit binaries might be slower on the SPARC. And that's because running software in 64bits don't give you any new hardware-features on the SPARC. but on AMD64 you get twice as much GP-registers (regural x86 has just 8, which is a MAJOR drawback!, AMD64 has 16), and twice as much SSE-registers.

Yay! thanks, I've been debating over whether or not my amd64 was a good purchase. Now it's comfirmed. It was a great purchase!!!_________________If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor. - Voltaire